Lesson 6

On the Road, Parts 2 – 5

Lesson 6 covers the rest of the novel, discussing each part, and pointing out a few highlights.

Part Two: An Abortive Second Trip

Dean Moriarty is the center of these 11 sections — he is louder than life when he is actually present, and he leaves a void in Sal’s life when he finally abandons Sal and Marylou in San Francisco.

More specifically, Part Two details three road trips in Dean’s Hudson — the quick back-and-forth jaunt from Virginia to New York, and the journey to San Francisco.

The narrator also continues to elevate Dean to epic status as the characterization deepens. Notice how Sal glorifies Dean’s superhuman feats of driving without sleeping or eating, his ability to keep several lovers satisfied, his sure sense of where to find excitement. It’s never hard to find Dean — unless Dean doesn’t want to be found, which happens at the end of Part Two.

Interestingly, Sal and Dean don’t have a personal conversation until more than a third of the way through the novel, and then they talk all night as the car rolls toward Virginia. Dean speaks of his jail experiences, speculating that he will never be in jail again, and follows with the statement, “The rest is not my fault” (121). He speaks of God and country as known quantities. It is difficult to know what Dean means, but Sal is fascinated, willing to admit he has no interpretation. He begins the subtle elevation of the figure of Dean nevertheless, first as mystic and then as saint, religious iconography in the making, in Kerouac’s Catholic idiom:

There was nothing clear about the things he said, but what he meant to say was somehow made pure and clear. He used the word “pure” a great deal. I had never dreamed Dean would become a mystic. These were the first days of his mysticism, which would lead to the strange, ragged W. C. Fields saintliness of his later days (121).

Clearly, Dean was one of the world’s great talkers. Sal knows his saint in the making is a con-man, but he thinks that knowledge will save him from being conned.

Part of Sal’s apprenticeship with the contemporary outlaw involves his participation in stealing. Not grand theft auto, but a little shoplifting, which is necessitated when a police fine depletes their gas money. Sal justifies his stepping into Dean’s world: “It was just like an invitation to steal to take our trip-money away from us” (136-7), he says, echoing Dean’s assertion that the rest is not his fault. And so he steals food for the adventure, while his compadres lift gas, cigarettes, and more food.

He also speaks of the pearl again:

[Dean] and I suddenly saw the whole country like an oyster for us to open; and the pearl was there, the pearl was there (138).

America is still a golden land of promise.

The stop in New Orleans to see Old Bull is also noteworthy. Sal describes the life of William S. Burroughs at that time with great accuracy. Did you notice how many references to guns arose in those sections — and the story of a man shooting his wife? In a way, Sal predicts something that doesn’t occur in the time frame of the novel, Burroughs’ accidental shooting of Joan Vollmer; she is Jane in the novel. In reality as in the novel, Burroughs was not much taken by Cassady, and he refused to give them any money for the trip.

At last the travelers reach California, where Dean leaves Sal and Marylou penniless to fend for themselves. Dean becomes a fallen angel: “I lost faith in Dean that year. I stayed in San Francisco a week and had the beatest time of my life” (171) — a time that included a whole bunch of great jazz and a sidewalk ecstasy, the fantastic passages on page 173, which speak of cycles of death and rebirth. The sentences build like a great sax solo, and they bottom out with the acknowledgement, “I was too young to know what had happened” (173) — the sidewalk connection with the archetypal and long-suffering mother is an apotheosis that comes to him later, as he narrates the experience.

But the pearl eludes Sal. A great night of live jazz with Dean does not console the weary traveler, and part two ends on a sour note. Note how the narrator speaks in present tense: “What I accomplished by coming to Frisco I don’t know” (178) — he still doesn’t know as he composes the narrative. As he leaves Dean and Marylou, a bitter reality emerges: “We were all thinking we’d never see one another again and we didn’t care” (178). Sal’s high-flying mystic guru is just a jerk.

However, the failure of the journey in part two assures that the search will continue through other trips.

Quote

“Whee. Sal, we gotta go and never stop going till we get there.”

“Where we going, man?”

“I don’t know but we gotta go.”

Part Three: Whose Fault Is It — And for That Matter, What Is IT?

Sal hits the road again in the spring of 1949, going to San Francisco by way of Denver. Reality intervenes immediately as the women surround Dean and salt and pepper him with his wrongdoings. Sal notes, “I suddenly realized that Dean, by virtue of his enormous series of sins, was becoming the Idiot, the Imbecile, the Saint of the lot” (194) — “the HOLY GOOF,” a play on the holy ghost. Having taken his verbal beating, Dean stands still. Sal realizes, “He was BEAT — the root, the soul of Beatific” (195). To Sal, this quality becomes part of Dean’s developing saintliness.

Gone is his anger from Dean’s abandonment; he defends the man who needs no defense: “I’ll bet you want to know what he does next and that’s because he’s got the secret that we’re all busting to find and it’s splitting his head wide open and if he goes mad don’t worry, it won’t be your fault but the fault of God” (195) — anyone but Dean’s fault. In this section, Dean becomes the pearl. He also takes Sal on the quest for “IT.”

But even Sal cannot resist slamming Dean. The section reveals what I call “Dual Visions of Dean” — opposite perspectives of the same person converging in the same character: devil and angel, man and boy, thief and giver, creator and destroyer. Sal observes, with some reverence:

It was remarkable how Dean could go mad and then suddenly continue with his soul — which I think is wrapped up in a fast car, a coast to reach, and a woman at the end of the road — calmly and sanely as though nothing had happened (232).

Sal sees Dean’s faults, but Sal claims the younger man as a brother as well as a “mad Ahab” whose obsessions could result in his death; their kinship deepens with time.

The romantic outlaw image deepens. As they speed toward Chicago in the doomed Cadillac, Sal fancies that they are “just like a new California gang come to contest the spoils of Chicago, a band of desperados escaped from the prisons of the Utah moon” (238). Does reality match Sal’s fantasy?

The trip has highs and lows — the two transcendent jazz sessions and the sublime writing that details them are definite high points; the all-night movies are a low: “If you sifted all Detroit in a wire basket the beater solid core of dregs couldn’t be better gathered” (245). Sal and Dean are part of the dregs.

In the end of Part Three, Sal is going home to his aunt, while Dean is divorcing Camille to marry Inez. Sal comes to a reality conclusion: “With one illegitimate child in the West somewhere, Dean then had four little ones and not a cent, and was all troubles and ecstasy and speed as ever” (248). The question of “fault” has been shelved.

Quote

“We’ve finally got to heaven.”

Part Four: The Quest for the Father — and Mother Mexico

The discovery of kinship is one of the mythic ideals, and it has a universal appeal. The need to create and exist within communities, if only temporarily, is manifested throughout On the Road. More specifically, reunion with the father is one of the most famous elements of the mythic quest, and Dean’s search for his father results in finding out where he is, temporarily, but never in meeting him. Still, Sal claims Dean as a brother despite having been left in Dean’s wake more than once. It’s almost a foregone conclusion that Dean will abandon him in his hour of need.

Still, Sal continues to sanctify Dean, at one point characterizing him as an angel from the apocalypse:

I had a vision of Dean, a burning shuddering frightful Angel, palpitating toward me across the road, approaching like a cloud, with enormous speed, pursuing me like the Shrouded Traveler on the plains with the mad, bony purpose and the gleaming eyes; I saw his wings; I was his old jalopy chariot with thousands of sparking flames shooting from it; I saw the path it burned over the road; it even made its own road and went over the corn, through cities, destroying bridges, drying rivers. It came like wrath to the West. I knew Dean had gone mad again. (259)

The end is near, and Sal cannot resist going for another ride, following the man he envies but cannot emulate.

In Part Four, Kerouac, having traveled America numerous times, suggests that IT cannot be found within the nation’s borders. What he is looking for is something less civilized, a jungle land where drugs, alcohol, and sex are cheap and easily procured, where a primitive innocence shines from the faces of children. In Mexico, the police are watchers and caretakers, not arbitrary enforcers who make travelers resort to theft.

IT is elsewhere, outside Kerouac’s culture. As they cross the symbolic border, which is also the mythical threshold, Sal and Dean enter together a new country, a place where even the ubiquitous Dean has never been:

Behind us lay the whole of America and everything Dean and I had previously known about life, and life on the road. We had finally found the magic land at the end of the road and we never dreamed the extent of the magic. (276)

In Mother Mexico the primary adjectives are “soft” and “golden” — notice how many times the words appear. The inevitable music is mambo — louder than Sal thought possible, “like the sounds you expect to hear on the last day of the world and the Second Coming” (286). Dean, former angel, is transfigured by the crossing: “In myriad pricklings of heavenly radiation I had to struggle to see Dean’s figure, and he looked like God” (284). The roadside children are holy innocents.

Everything in Mexico brings the word arrival to mind. They’ve arrived and they know it. “We’d made it,” Sal exults, “a total of nineteen hundred miles from the afternoon yards of Denver to these vast and Biblical areas of the world, and now we were about to reach the end of the road” (299).

And at the end of the road is the city of gold, “the great and final wild uninhibited Fellahin-childlike city that we knew we would find at the end of the road” (301). So this is IT. This is the pearl.

Even here, though, stark realities descend: Sal gets dysentery, and Dean, having procured the quick Mexican divorce that was the object of his trip, leaves Sal languishing. Their partings are, as usual, tinged with bitterness, but this time, Sal forgives Dean instantly:

When I got better I realized what a rat he was, but then I had to understand the impossible complexity of his life, how he had to leave me there, sick, to get on with his wives and woes. “Okay, old Dean, I’ll say nothing” (302).

The last sentence is somewhat puzzling. Sal might say nothing to Dean’s face, but he does tell the reader everything. In detail. Kerouac as Sal has stripped Neal Cassady to the core.

Part Five: Go Moan for Man

The last section catalogues Dean’s pointless, ill-timed journey to “SEE” Sal. But for once, Dean is silent and still, not overflowing with his boundless enthusiasm. He sees that Sal is settling, he has appointments, a Duke Ellington concert to attend; Dean is not part of his world — he can’t even ride with them. Dean isn’t behind a wheel. He isn’t orchestrating the people around him. He’s out of ideas, a forlorn figure and “idiot,” (306) and not a holy one.

For once, Sal will not follow Dean. For once, Sal gets to leave Dean in the dust, but he can’t keep his mind on the great jazz at the concert — he cannot recreate the concert for the reader as he always has. Jazz by appointment is not as savory as spontaneous jazz in Chicago or San Francisco. His mind turns to Dean, and the myth-making continues in a beautiful, transcendent, jazz paragraph of his own composition — soloing on the Dean who has been everywhere so many times that he is becoming the everywhere. Let’s look at Sal’s last paragraph again:

So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.

The beautiful concluding passage casts Dean’s shadow across the whole of America, pronouncing a benediction on the unknown and the known — Dean’s father and his son — constantly in motion, even as the nation sleeps and they grow older, Sal “moans for man.”

Drawing Conclusions

On the Road is a classic because Kerouac captured something of the spirit of the time that was teeming beneath the surface of America, and Kerouac recognized it and called on it to rise and manifest — and it did; the culture changed. On the Road would not continue to be so famous if it were a mere snapshot of its time, though. Dean Moriarty and the epic journey endure, and something universal emerges from the pages, probably something different for everyone. There are so many themes we could identify and consider, but in this short page, I wish to throw out some questions for your consideration.

One of the prevailing theories about travel narratives is that people go to other places for inside and outside reasons — to discover new parts of themselves as well as to see new sights. Have you gone somewhere new and found something new about yourself? Write a page about where you went and what you discovered.

Do you think that Sal has given a complete characterization of himself and Dean in the novel? What about the other characters?

In the end, what impact does Dean seem to have on Sal’s life? Do either of them change noticeably because of their relationship?

What do you think of the roles and treatment of women in the novel? How do you think Dean and Sal see the place of women in the world?

What is “IT” in the novel? Does it change from time to time, place to place? What is IT in your own life? How do you know when you’ve arrived?

In the second half of the novel, Dean begins repeating the phrase about “knowing time.” Sal recognizes that “knowing time” sets people apart, even makes them mystics and sages, but he never attempts to define the term. What do you think knowing time means? Do you see any connection between knowing time and jazz (in which the musicians have to keep track of linear time even as they bend it all out of shape in their playing)?

And, finally, one from Dean:

What’s your road, man? — holyboy road, madman road, rainbow road, guppy road, any road. It’s an anywhere road for anybody anyhow. Where body how?

On the Road invites you to answer Dean’s question, and as the novel attests, each venture reveals a different answer.

Assignment: On the Road, Parts 2 – 5

In The Portable Beat Reader, familiarize yourself with the natural voices of the four key players through their letters. Read the correspondence between Ginsberg and Burroughs (pages 116-126), and the exchange between Cassady and Kerouac, (197-211).